> -----Original Message-----
> UNITE did the right thing. They didn't do anything "progressive," as you'd
> claimed...The third clause
> sounds like a basic human and labor right, and there's nothing heroic in
> achieving that.
This last sentence is where you're wrong. Achieving basic human and labor rights is about as heroic an act you can achieve under capitalism.
> It's amazing how you turn every criticism of union leaders and union
> blather into a blanket criticism of "unions." Nowhere did I criticize
> rank-and-filers, activists, or unions as an institution.
This abstract opposition between "leaders" and "activists" is exactly what is so disengenuous. When TDU activists become heads of unions, does that mean they cross some divide into evil self-satisfied anti-progressivism.
Rich Trumka back in the 1970s was part of Miners for Democracy, helped lead the fight to throw out the murdering Boyle leadership, and when the union was close to destroyed under the welter of federal injunctions and fines over wildcats and more conservative leadership took over, Trumka went back into the mines and as a rank-and-filer, he led a new group that took power in the Miners union.
So at what point was he a virtuous "rank-and-filer" and when did he cross into the dreaded "leader" category where anyone can question his integrity without presenting evidence?
And since however rough democracy is in unions, it is real. So the bashing of union leaders is bashing the decisions of rank-and-file members in many cases, and those members sure as hell see it as such in many cases. That is not the same as making honest crticism and arguing for reforms and more radical programs, which many folks welcome.
And there are individual union leaders who are corrupt and anti-democratic, and should be named as such.
But when the sins of those individual corrupt union folks are generalized into an overall abuse of "labor bosses", there is little difference between your statements and rightwing anti-union propaganda. You may think you are doing with some kind of virtuous program, but it just feeds the rightwing desire to tar all union leaders as corrupt and interested only in dues. Where radicals buy into that rightwing line on union leadership, they are just acting as stooges for the anti-union propaganda arm.
And let me note, I have written for LaborNotes, so I don't include criticism of Slaughter et al, since they never make such blanket descriptions of "union leaders" as somehow despicable. They will describe them overall as conservative, but they will not impugn their integrity as a unified group the way a lot of leftists aping the "rank-and-file" line do.
> >When unemployment was a lot higher in 1984 [sic; 1994], the unions
> >came out across the board against Prop 187, the anti-immigrant
> initiative.
> >Unions like SEIU 1877, the janitors union, campaigned heavily on the
> >initiative, making it one of their highest priorities in that election.
>
> Minor point: Weren't most of the heaviest campaigners still
> affiliated with
> SEIU 399 during Proposition 187? As I recall, most of the janitors didn't
> join 1877 until '97. I could be wrong though.
> But it's worth noting that the janitors switched affiliation because of
> 399's racist, and antidemocratic, leadership (and again, I was only
> referring to leadership in my post). When the minority-heavy rank-and-file
> slate won control of the executive board in the early '90s, the white
> president disbanded the board and placed the local in trusteeship--so that
> blacks and immigrants wouldn't control their union. So it's fine if
> illegals keep their jobs, as long as they don't ask for rights within the
> union.
First, 1877 was the janitors local covering all of Northern California, while 399 covered janitors and a number of other groups like hospital workers down south. And both campaigned hard against Prop 187.
As for the 399 situation, you simply an ugly internal fight to make generalizations. The new slate of folks could not defeat the union president in the election, because of his popularity, so they did not even contest his position. So that left an incredibly divided leadership which led the union into complete stalemate and acrimony. No question there were problems of racism in the local, but the internal problems also came from the new slate trying to fire a bunch of the staff, who in SEIU were themselves unionized, so the new folks immediately were engaged in illegally trying to bust the union of the local staff. They may have have seen that as a means to improve the local union, but it still created a crisis in the union.
The solution to the stalemate (imposed by the national union, not the local president), and I don't think it was a good one, was to divide the local, move the health care workers into one local and move the janitors into SEIU 1877 to create a statewide janitors local. But note that 1877 has a latino president and a diverse overall leadership. So leaving out that fact is stacking the rhetoric towards union white supremacy.
This whole "rank-and-file good, leadership bad" rhetoric is also ridiculous historically. In a lot of areas, it was democratic rank-and-file unions that excluded blacks and immigrants from membership and it was often national leadership of unions that (however forced by the law) had to impose desegration on those unions. Worshipping at the altar of local democracy may look good in a place like 399, but let's talk about the issue we started on, calling in the INS. It is the national policy of most unions now to organize immigrants, not work with the INS. If a local union responding to white membership attitudes began systematically using INS raids to support their current union members, would you worship that kind of "rank-and-file" action?
It's just all too simplistic in the rhetoric and just glosses over complexities in favor of a fundamentalist "line" that has to ignore a lot of facts and history to keep it up.
-- Nathan Newman